Horror

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Dementia 13

The Filmgroup

Roger Corman Productions

American International Pictures

Ireland

United States of America

English

William Campbell

Luana Anders

Bart Patton

Mary Mitchel

Patrick Magee

Eithne Dunne

Peter Read

Karl Schanzer

Ron Perry

Derry O'Donavan

Barbara Dowling

Francis Ford Coppola

Roger Corman

Eleanor Coppola

John Vicario

Paul Julian

Michael Purcell

Patrick Brady

Patrick Doyle

George Brady

Michael Vines

Eyemonn Callian

William Joseph Bryan

Jack Hill

Charles Hannawalt

Stuart O'Brien

Morton Tubor

Marianne Wood

Al Locatelli

Richard F. Dalton

Edward Delaney

Donald Shebib

Angela Wadlow

Joseph Gross

Liam Saurin

Ronald Stein

This was a tad eccentric but proved to me a very delightfully surreal horror film. In watching this, you immediately get the feeling the director has both interesting, out-of-the-ordinary ideas plus the balls to do things his own way. It's flawed, but definitely shows plenty of directing chops and potential for brilliance, just a few years down the road. A bona-fide, low-budget, American classic.

***Coppola’s version of “Psycho,” sort of***

After the sudden death of her husband, an American woman (Luana Anders) keeps it secret and tries to ingratiate herself to the matriarch at the family’s manor in Ireland in order to extort part of the inheritance. But there’s a dark pall over the family after an accidental drowning seven years earlier, not to mention the specter of a psycho with an axe! William Campbell plays the strange brother and Mary Mitchel his fiancée.

Shot in B&W, “Dementia 13” (1963), aka “The Haunted and the Hunted,” was the theatrical debut for writer/director Francis Ford Coppola after producer Roger Corman offered him to do a low-budget imitation of “Psycho” (1960) in Ireland with funds left over from his movie “The Young Racers,” on which Coppola worked as a sound technician. Actually, this wasn’t technically Coppola’s first film as he did eleven days shooting of Corman’s superior “The Terror” in Big Sur, California.

The story and setting are very different from “Psycho” and its sister English film “Horror Hotel” (aka “The City of the Dead”), which was produced/released at the same time as “Psycho,” although it wasn’t released in America until two years later. Nevertheless, “Dementia 13” is cut from the same B&W horror cloth and shares an infamous plot twist that originated with those two films. Like “Psycho,” there’s a psycho madman, although he prefers an axe to a butcher knife.

Unfortunately, “Dementia 13” isn’t great like “Psycho” or formidable like “Horror Hotel,” mainly because the story is sorta befuddling (like the two bodies of water that aren’t properly differentiated), although most everything’s explained at the end. There’s a good gothic ambiance, but the bewildering storytelling prevents the flick from taking off. And Luana Anders, while okay, is second rate compared to the breathtaking Venetia Stevenson in “Horror Hotel” and Janet Leigh in “Psycho.”

Corman wasn’t happy with what Coppola brought home to California. He (rightly) insisted that certain scenes needed simplified and that more violence was necessary, to which Jack Hill was hired to shoot the additional poacher scenes. A useless prologue was also tacked on to beef-up the runtime, which wasn’t featured on the version I watched. If you’re familiar with Coppola’s later work, like “Youth Without Youth” (2007) and “Twixt” (2011), you know that he has the tendency to overcomplicate scripts. That’s the problem with “Dementia 13.” Still, it definitely upped the slasher ante and influenced that particular horror genre.

The film runs 1 hour, 15 minutes and was shot in Ireland (Howth Castle, Howth, and Ardmore Studios in Bray). It was remade and improved in color in 2017. 

GRADE: C

Mick Garris on DEMENTIA 13

Trailer - Dementia 13 (1963)

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Dementia 13

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Cast

William Campbell

Luana Anders

Bart Patton

Mary Mitchel

Patrick Magee

Eithne Dunne

Peter Read

Karl Schanzer

Ron Perry

Derry O'Donavan

Box office

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